DoodlePad – a free, open sourced sketching App for Windows Phone

Summary

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while are probably familiar with what DoodlePad is. For those new, DoodlePad is a fun little sketch app I wrote for my kids when Windows Phone was launched in the fall of 2010. It has done fairly well (at least by my own standards) since launch with over 35,000 downloads globally for both the free and paid versions.

Why Open Source?

DoodlePad was never intended to be a full featured art application but more of an easy to use, simple UI that anyone could pick up and sketch or take pictures with. The reviews have been largely positive with the negative reviews revolving around drawing performance. Unfortunately, as you will see in the code, the drawing performance comes form the Ink Presenter class in the Windows Phone Runtime itself. Since I chose to go with the native Silverlight capabilities rather than an XNA approach there wasn’t anything I could do about performance without a re-write.

The app itself is still making money but I knew in my heart I had no intention of going back and rewriting it. I also switched roles at Microsoft last year from Windows Phone to a Technology Evangelist for Windows 8. Technically speaking I’ve been going much deeper on the JavaScript and HTML5 side of the house lately and to take on a full XAML/C# project, especially for an app that is towards end of life, didn’t seem worth investing in. So why not give the code back to you, the community, as a way to get started with your own apps! I’m continually impressed by what I see developers doing with Windows Phone and if my code helps them with their app than that’s worth more than any money I’d make each month.

Thanks to Microsoft’s generous moonlighting policy for employees writing Windows Phone applications I own all the code. So I’ve chose to release it under an Apache 2.0 license and post it up to Github here.

Conclusion

I am not including a NOTICE file with the Apache license so you are pretty much free to do with the code what you want. If you want to thank me you can include a link to my twitter (https://twitter.com/thedavedev) in your code or app credits but totally not required. I’ve also included all of my cusotm icons as Expression Design files so if you have been looking for additional resources for your apps feel free to re-use. Enjoy!